White Page After Adding or Updating a Post? Check your plugins!

When you host a lot of WordPress sites, you never stop learning about WordPress and the common issues that WordPress authors run into.

WordPress does one thing really well. It allows people to get a blog up and running in a few minutes with absolutely no knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, or MYSQL which is both a good and bad thing. Good because blogs are all about writing. Bad because if you don’t know much about how the underlying system works, then you can run into issues.

One such issue I worked on yesterday. A customer was having an issue with saving and updating posts and being directed to a blank screen afterwards.

After following the standard “Deactivate all plugins and activate them one by one” I found the culprit. It was a plugin called “Social Networks Auto Poster (S.N.A.P)” that was having problems.

Apparently this plugin requires a minimum of 40MB of ram to be allocated to PHP to even function properly. After updating the customers PHP.ini and allowing a bit more RAM, then issue disappeared.

In my clients case, we allow more RAM to be allocated to PHP as necessary however many hosts allow a maximum amount of RAM and do not allow for higher RAM usage than their maximum. So in this case it could be fixed however in the case of other hosts, they would simply tell you to get rid of this plugin.

I hope you enjoyed the first post in this series, and I look forward to writing more and more as I encounter different bugs in WordPress themes and plugins.